Archive for the ‘“Kepler field of view”’ Category

We take a look at the so called ‘Tatooine’ planet that hit the news recently, some updates on the supposedly faster than light neutrinos, new underwater invisibility cloak technology, maps, Mercury, Tsunami tech, and even take a peek at what’s up in the sky this week.

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Why did we bring SciByte back?

Chris:

Too much out there is just plain distraction, why can’t we have our cake and eat it too? This is an important mission for us at Jupiter Broadcasting. We don’t want to offer only entertainment, but also information, news, and other things that just make you a treasure trove of small talk at your next cocktail party!

I almost see it as a public service too, this stuff is important and it impacts our entire universe!

Heather:

There are a lot of interesting things going on out there in science, but getting to the interesting bits without all the hype you get from major media outlets is a trick we are hoping to pull off.

The whole scientific method is about investigation and acquiring new knowledge to add to or correct old knowledge. We’ll provide you with enough knowledge to show off to friends and family and provide you the means, with the help of our trusty show notes, to further investigate the things that interest you the most.

“Tatooine” Planet

The low down

Located near the western wingtip of the constellation Cygnus the swan.

Both stars are cooler and smaller than our sun, one is 69% and the other only 20% the size of our sun

Kepler 16A and 16B orbit each other every 41 days.

The two stars are approximately 2 billion years younger than our solar system

Kepler–16b is half rock and half gas

The planet orbits around both stars every 229 days (Venus orbits out sun every 225 days)

Kepler–16b lies outside the habital zone

Temperatures on Kepler16b are thought to be around –100 to –150 F / –73 to –101 C
embed[http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=111428361]/embed

Significance

Kepler–16b falls inside the radius that was thought to be the inner limit for planet formation in a binary star system, at about half the distance it was thought would be needed for a stable orbit

Next year, Kepler–16b’s transit will cause a 1.7 percent drop in the brightness of the bigger star, which will be visible in parts of Asia to amateur astronomers with telescopes.

Due to variations in the orbital plane of the Kepler 16b system as seen from Earth the planet will stop crossing one of the stars as soon as 2014 and cease transiting the other, brighter one in 2018. It will be around 2042 before the show starts up again for Earthlings.

Bill Welsh of San Diego State University was presenting convincing evidence at the conference for at least three and possibly a dozen other circumbinary planets in the Kepler field of view.

Faster than light Neutrinos

The low down

Neutrinos are among the weirdest denizens of the weird quantum subatomic world. Once thought to be massless and to travel at the speed of light, they can sail through walls and planets like wind through a screen door.

Neutrinos come in three varieties and can morph from one form to another as they travel along, an effect that the Opera experiment was designed to detect by comparing 10-microsecond pulses of protons on one end with pulses of neutrinos at the other.

OPERA detects neutrinos that are fired through the earth and make the 450mi/730km trek from the European particle physics laboratory, CERN

Since neutrinos hardly interact at all with other matter, they stream right through the ground, with only a very few striking the material in the detector and making a noticeable shower of particles.

Significance

Over 3 years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730km / 450mi, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. (~ 0.0025% faster)

There have been over 80 papers either attempting to explain the result using various exotic theoretical models or challenging the experimental calculations

One group countered that challenge by saying they will print a revised version of how they synchronized the clocks to make the method clearer

Various part of the surface of the Earth are exposed to very slight deviations in gravity

The CERN site in Switzerland where the neutrinos were fired has a slightly stronger gravitational pull than Gran Sasso Italy where they were detected.

This slight difference in gravity would affect how fast the two clocks at each end ran.

Keeping time is again the domain of the GPS satellites which each broadcasting a highly accurate time signal from orbit some 20,000km overhead

The radio waves from the GPS satellites do travel at the speed of light, but the time of flight still matters

From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter

There is also a group saying that anything traveling faster than the speed of light would shed energy in the form of radiation, but that type of radiation was not detected

This announcement really seemed to be a group of scientists who had results that they couldn’t explain away, so asked the scientific community as a whole to help find any holes to poke in the data.

Functional Invisibility cloak! using mirage effect underwater

University of Dallas scientists have found a way to fashion carbon nanotubes, the same material used to improve displays and solar panels, into an invisibility cloak.

Scientists discovered that if they heated the tubes underwater they could create a “mirage effect” to make objects completely disappear.

Carbon nanotubes are one-molecule-thick sheets of carbon that are looped into tubes, They have the density of air, but the strength of steel.

Significance

The carbon nanotubes are essentially recreating the same effect by boiling the water around it and bending light with the resulting water vapor. The effect is immediate, as if somebody is turning on a light switch

Error in Greenland Ice Map

Latest edition of Britain’s influential Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World,originally claimed that Greenland had lost 15 percent of its permanent ice cover from 1999 to 2011.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center- NSIDC located in Colorado however came out to say it was more like 0.1% ice loss during that time.

A glaciologist at the NSIDC center, set out to reverse-engineer the error. His best guess, after a foray into cartographic forensics, was that a mapmaker at the atlas had mistaken a center’s map of Greenland’s central, thickest ice sheet without peripheral glaciers for one showing its extent.

Significance

While HarperCollins subsidiary Collins Geo, publisher of the Times atlas’s 13th edition, originally stood by their maps as printed they have since apologized for the news release

An update will come in the form of an insert, presumably issued to anyone who purchased the atlas. In addition to showing a revised version of the map, the insert will also include information about why the change was made. The Times also plans to publish “any material generated as a result of this activity” online.

Planet Mercury Full of Strange Surprises

The Messenger Spacecraft orbiting Mercury has completed it’s first Mercury day of orbit

That’s 176 Earth days, while Mercury’s years is a mere 88 Earth Days, that’s 2 years / day

The first 6 months of data was released including information on magnetic field, Mercury’s
tenuous exoshpere, and surface composition

The surface composition of Mercury is different the other inner rocky planets

there are huge expanses of volcanic plain in the surrounding the noNorthern polar region

Evidence suggests that it formed during a different time than the other inner planets

There are also substantially hier amounts of sulfur and potassium than predicted (both vaporize at high temperatures, so extreme high-temperature events in it’s past are ruled out)

Scientists have also discovered vents, measuring up to 25 kilometers (km) (15.5 miles) in length, that appear to be the source of some of the tremendous volumes of very hot lava that have rushed out over the surface

Looking back this week

Oct 14, 1947 – 64 years ago – A loud boom cracked the skies above California when Chuck Yeager became the first official person to break the sound barrier, although there are other plausible claims with eyewitnesses and instruments that strongly imply that George Welch was the actual first person to break the sound barrier, beating Yeager by a mere 30 min he lacked a ‘properly’ monitored flight to become the official first person person.

Oct 18, 1954 – 57 years ago – Texas Instruments of Texas and Industrial Development Engineering Associates (I.D.E.A.) of Indiana brought together the entertainment medium of the radio and the cutting edge technology of transistors and the first commercially available transistor radio the Regency TR–1 became available. Newsreel from 1954
TI introduced the first trasistor radio

Looking up this week

This month Saturn sets just before Jupiter rises, and Venus is moving from the morning sky before dawn to the evening sky.

This month Jupiter is in opposition (opposite the sun to us), but it makes for good observations

Jupiter is roughly 45° up in the late evening skies to the East (height depends on where you are and what time your observing)

In the Pre-Dawn hours of the 20–22 you can see the Waning Moon in the SE about half way up the sky, along with the planet Mars

You might also be able to see a few Orionid metoers later this week in the SE skies as they peak in the Early morning hours of Saturday Oct 22, waiting till just after midnight might get you rates of up to 25 meteors per hour ( ~ 1/ 2.5 min )

The ROSAT X-ray observatory, launched in 1990 by NASA and managed for years by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), will re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere within the next two weeks. Current best estimates place the re-entry between Oct. 21st and 24th over an unknown part of Earth. (A Day before re-entry the estimate will be +/- 5 hours)